A Postcard From 1939 Arrived Last Year -- Addressed to Me

Last spring a postcard came in the mail that was postmarked 1939.

I want to be careful here, because I know how this reads, and I have spent a year trying to poke holes in it myself. So let me just tell you the plain facts first and you can do with them what you like.

The postcard was old. Genuinely old -- brittle, foxed, with a one-cent stamp and a postmark from a town in the mountains, dated August 1939. The picture on the front was a hand-tinted photo of a lake. And on the back, in fountain pen gone brown, was a short message and an address. The address was my address. And the name it was addressed to was my name. My full name, first and last, the same name I have had for thirty-one years, written on a card mailed eighty-seven years ago.

I have a fairly unusual name. I was, as far as I knew, named after nobody. My parents picked it because they liked it. That is the story I grew up with.

The message on the back said: We arrived safe. The lake is just as she described it. Wish you could have come with us this time -- next summer, we promise. All our love. And then an initial, a single letter, that I will keep to myself.

I did the responsible things. I took it to a postal historian, who confirmed the stamp, the postmark, and the ink were all consistent with 1939 and showed no signs of forgery. I checked whether my address existed in 1939 -- it did; the house was built in 1926. I tried to find out who had lived here then. And I called my grandmother, mostly to ask if the handwriting meant anything to her.

My grandmother is ninety-four. When I described the postcard, she was quiet for a long moment, and then she said, in a voice I had never heard her use, oh. It came to you. And I said, what came to me, and she said, the lake card. It was always going to be you. And then she would not say anything else on the phone. She said, come here, bring it, this is not a telephone thing.

So I drove the four hours and I sat in her kitchen and I put the postcard on the table between us, and my grandmother put on her glasses and looked at it for a long time and then she told me a story I had never heard.

In 1939, she said, when she was a little girl of seven, her family was supposed to go to the mountains for the summer, to a lake, with cousins. She was not allowed to go -- she had been sick, and her mother kept her home, and she was heartbroken about it, and her cousin had promised to send her a postcard from the lake so she would feel like she had been there too. The cousin sent the card. But it never arrived. My grandmother waited all summer and it never came, and she never forgot it, this small childhood grief of a promised postcard that vanished into the mail.

The cousin who mailed it, and the family who went to the lake that August of 1939 -- most of them did not come home. There was an accident on the way back, in the mountains, in the dark. My grandmother, the sick little girl left behind, was one of the only ones of that branch to grow up. She grew up, and had my mother, and my mother had me, and when I was born my mother chose a name she liked with no idea, none, that it had ever belonged to anyone.

Except it had. My grandmother told me, in her kitchen, that the cousin who mailed the lost postcard, the girl who died in the mountains at nineteen, had the same unusual name that I have. That I was, without anyone knowing it, named after her. My mother had simply, somehow, landed on it.

So the postcard was mailed to a nineteen-year-old girl in 1939, addressed to her at her own family home, which is a house that stayed in the family and is now, by a long chain of inheritance, my house. And it took eighty-seven years to be delivered, arriving at the same address, to a person with the same name, who turns out to be the great-grand-niece named after the sender's own dead cousin.

The postal historian says lost mail resurfaces sometimes -- caught behind a sorting machine, found in an estate, remailed by a stranger decades later. That is almost certainly what happened. Almost certainly.

But my grandmother does not think so, and she is the only one who was there. She held the card to her chest in her kitchen and she said, she finally sent it. She always said she would send it. And I did not have the heart, or maybe the certainty, to tell her she was wrong. The card is framed on my wall now. Wish you could have come with us this time. Next summer, we promise. I keep almost, almost, feeling like I remember the lake.